REEMAY: From the lab to the garden

Or: Helping your garden survive a heat wave with salvaged materials

Reemay is a non-woven, spun-bond polyester fabric. Paper conservators use it for many purposes: supporting artwork during bathing or humidification, as a release layer for mending or lining, etc. Textile conservators also use it for similar purposes. Object conservators can use it too: as an archival storage material, for leather repairs, to make Halloween ghost decorations, and so forth. Reemay can be reused in the lab. But sometimes it just gets too funky to keep using on artwork and artifacts. This is where my hoarding sensibilities really pay off. I can't bear the thought of tossing old Reemay just because it's dirty by conservation standards, because it's still really clean by garden standards. So instead of throwing it out, I take it home, while mumbling, "Score!" 

Reemay gets used in the garden quite a lot. Usually in garden catalogues it's called "floating row cover," or some variant of that. It will let water in, and a portion of light. Depending on the thickness or weight of the particular Reemay you have, you can use it to protect your plants from light frosts or exclude bugs. This particular heat-wave weekend, I'm using some scraps I've saved to provide shade for pea and flower seedlings that I had sowed earlier in the month, when it was really really cold (not loving this confused weather). We're expecting at least another two days of temperatures near or past the century mark, and I'm not sure how well this is going to work, but I figure it's worth a shot. 

When Reemay is being used to protect plants from frosts or exclude pests, you're supposed to really tuck in all the edges around the plants. I'm doing the opposite of that right now, because I figure the plants need lots of air circulation to stay cool and the bugs are the least of my worries right now. I really just want to block out a portion of the sunlight. The Reemay I've got is a medium-weight material so it does seem to block out a decent bit of light. I clipped the Reemay to stakes and fencing with whatever I had on hand (orchid support clips, bulldog clips, clothespins), leaving a good amount of space between the fabric and the plant itself to try and maximize shading and minimize insulation of heat. I didn't have a ton of the Reemay so the darker scrap you see in the photograph hanging on stakes is actually a piece of weed block fabric that was laying around. I'm not positive what that particular stuff is made of, but it also appears to be some spun-bond polymer fabric. I think it's sufficient for my purposes. I'm really hoping this works. For the first time I actually used an inoculant on my peas and they were looking pretty awesome so I don't want to lose them to this heat. I'll update this later with how it all turned out...

-J